With this release we've created a modern Bing.com experience - one that is faster, cleaner and more visually appealing. We believe that search can be beautiful as well as functional and efficient. With that as our goal, we evaluated fonts, spacing, color, visual scan patterns, the search box and even the underlying code.

My problem with this and recent moves by Google: when I do a regular search, I do not want my search results to be spammed by news, picture, and video results. Bing seems to follow in Google's footsteps by adding irrelevant crap to search results for the sake of looking cool, but at the cost of usability.

I mean, check this screenshot. How much of the page is reserved for actual search results, and not pictures, info boxes, news items, and god knows what else?

Google's "start page' used to be very simple - just a text entry box. Over time it has acquired all sorts of irritating behavior - text box jumping around the screen, unrequested drop-down menus suggesting useless information and distracting from one's typing ... blech!

Bing has its own irritants - unwanted panoramic images, and now popup links to news articles. More blech!

While this is true, I can't think of the last time I actually went to Bing.com or Google.com and used the search page. All of the browsers I use either have a dedicated search box or allow you to search from the URL bar.

DDG is great at this; I have it as the default engine in my search bar, and use !g or !wiki for traditional searches, or !bimages since Bing is better at image results than Google.